Re: Is this an off-the wall suggestion or what?

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> Note: Sorry to repost but feared this message was hidden under a
> misleading subject.
> Comments please...
> 
> 
> Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:
> 
> > I want to search my collection of ding articles for any instance of
> > messages containing information about using message IDs.  I want to do
> > the same in Gnus.emacs.gnus.
> > 
> > I don't want to have to find the messages one by one and read enough
> > to see if they are about what I want to know.
> > 
> > I want to find all instances that contain the info and then be able to
> > look at the subject lines and authors in a summary buffer.
> > A limited view of the findings.
> > 
> > Can this be done with currant Quassia-gnus?
> > 
> 
> [ ... ]
> 
> With Quassias new abilities as off line reader it now makes sense to be
> able to search a group (even across groups) for regexp in bodies and be
> presented with a limited view in summary buffer of the findings.
> With many articles stored on disk (at least temp.) then a search of this
> kind is fast  and very usefull.
> 
> [ ... ]
> 
> Is this an off the wall suggestion or what?

I also would find this to be very useful.  I download news via a
cron-based background process, so all the news I access is within a
local spool at the time it's being read.  The functionality you
suggest would run fast under this configuration.

I already make use of `gnus-summary-search-article-forward' to find
individual articles whose bodies contain strings that match regexps
of my choosing.  This function already gets us part of the way there
towards the capabilities you are suggesting.

Perhaps instead of a limited view in the summary buffer, this could be
done via some sort of virtual newsgroup: the user enters a regexp in
the summary buffer, and all articles which have bodies (or headers and
bodies) that match this regexp will appear as entries in a newly
created, ad hoc newsgroup.  I think that such an ad hoc newsgroup
might be easier to implement in Gnus as it stands today than 
a limited view in the summary buffer.

To discourage abuse of something like this, perhaps by default, it
would only work in cases where Gnus can determine that the news
resides on a locally accessible disk ... with a variable to override
this behavior for those who really want to do so.  And imagine what
would happen if someone used this within `nnkiboze' groups!!! ...
perhaps it would have to be necessary to invoke some kind of
complicated-to-code-and-hard-to-remember mumbo-jumbo before this
feature could be used in `nnkiboze' groups.

But all in all, I consider this to be worthwhile functionality.

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com